Saturday (Milton Clean Up)

 

Milton hit Siesta Key around 8:30 with sustained winds of 120 mph, making it a category 3 hurricane. Landfall was about 60 miles south of us, but because of a cold front, the winds and moisture were north of the eye as you can see in the above screenshot. We got 6 inches of rain from 9-10, a catastrophic amount of rain in one hour. Our winds peaked at around 50 mph.

Some moisture came into our trench in the bathroom renovation, from under the foundation.

We started clean up as soon as there was daylight after a 5:30 run to Wawa for coffee and to charge our phones.

We sawed one broken branch from the magnolia, one from the avocado tree in the backyard, and a couple of crape myrtle tree branches. The rest were small branches, twigs, and leaves, lots of them. The yard looked like it was covered in paper mache. 

We raked and cleaned out the beds.

I think we ended up with a dozen containers full of debris, plus one large pile of bigger stuff. By the end of Friday, we had the front yard and one side yard cleared. We ate things from our fridge and went to bed exhausted.

We were without power for 57 hours, long enough to eat most everything out of our refrigerator and begin tossing what was left. We entertained ourselves playing with Toby, walking in the neighborhood, talking with neighbors, and riding our bikes. The causeway is still blocked. The Causeway Plaza looks gutted, as are all of the ground floor buildings on the way to the causeway. This time there was not much flooding, but it was hard to tell which hurricane caused which damage.

Friday, our neighbor came home. We restarted their water, propane, water heater, and picked up branches.

Later, we finished picking up our back yard and side yards.

The city maintained water and sewer services, unlike St. Petersburg which lacked both.

The roofs looked good.

We lost at least a week on our renovation project. I hope they will get back to it on Monday. 

It's going to take the city a long time to pick up debris.

The second and third nights without power were not bad. The temperature was in the 60s at night due to the cold front that kept the wind speed down and pushed landfall further south. We slept well.